Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Sangster, Eve (O2008.11) |
| Interviewee | Eve Sangster Obituary |
| Interviewer | Peter Ruffles (PR) |
| Date | 28/10/2008 |
| Transcriber by | Jean Riddell (Purkis) |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no: 02008.11
Subject: Sangster, Eve (Obituary)
Date: 28th October 2008 for 13th November 2008 funeral,
All Saints, Hertford
Venue: Sawbridgeworth
Recorder: Peter Ruffles (PR)
Transcriber: Jean Riddell (Purkis)
Typed by: Corin Jones
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
It’s not inappropriate that I’m recording this tribute to Eve - recording, making a record, was very much part of Eve but, of course, it had to be done well.
Eve has been of huge importance to Hertford, she has initiated, supported, maintained, protested, and the Eve Sangster hallmark has always to have done these things for the place, the whole town, for others, with great care, with much intelligent thought after debate, and always with a quality which few could match. I expect others will have recognised and put on record today the town’s debt to Eve across a wide range of community areas and that the Civic Society will have been uppermost in people’s minds.
I want, though, to describe briefly the part that Eve has played in Hertford Oral History Group. It is an Eve quintessential, as much as any other public work this venture, over a 20-year period, encapsulates. Eve initiated. She pulled a few people of her choosing together to undertake what she knew would be an important task. She supported others in that work, she maintained the work, in particular she maintained the founding principles – it’s about standards. Never absent from one of its almost 100 group meetings, often responsible for the impeccable minutes. Eve organised its constitution, it’s member training and the balances of its programme. With Jean Riddell, her writing – the sales of Eves publication which were the product of meticulous and scholarly research and colourfully enhanced by contributions from Hertford people under the Oral History programme of recordings, with Jean’s, Eve’s works made a handsome profit and the Oral History not only maintained itself but has been able to support financially other related local causes especially the Hertford Museum.
So, writing and recording, because of Eve, has enabled us to have a long-lasting resource locally for our town. But it was more than just doing the historian thing, however, there was the added Eve element. Eve was aware that 400 people had been very generous in sharing, sometimes in their stories, personal intimacies, their tapes were a gift of something particularly precious for them and she wouldn’t let us simply say thank you and take the captured information away, our harvest as it were. Our 400, mostly elderly, but from all walks of life – gentry, shopkeepers, builders, people born in great poverty, people nicely off were, because of Eve’s principles, repeatedly thanked year after year, not forgotten.
They were thanked with a Christmas card; they were thanked with a newsletter. A summer party was held year by year and the worth and value, and others’ gratitude for each individual’s gift of their history has been repeatedly brought home to them. That was an important extra with Eve. Eve wanted quality. She loved the humour and the wit, was moved emotionally by much that the people shared and she knew the lasting value. The results of her ingenious conceivings, her articulate presentation, her scholarship and her love of Hertford and its people in all their forms who make the fabric of the town, in our time, will be an enduring and valued record and today especially, as we shall doubtless continue to do, into the future.
Hertford, Royal Borough, County Town thanks God for her.
End